


also known as

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coming Out, F/F, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Other, S1 Insert, platonic or romantic interps allowed, trans!Fitz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 15:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13550145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: After the Fall of SHIELD, Fitz comes out to Skye - partly for security reasons and partly because he's wanted to tell her for a while now and never quite did.





	also known as

**Author's Note:**

> the prompt was "trans!Fitz with FitzSkimmons", so I wrote this which has been floating around in my head for a while. you're welcome to read whichever ships into it you so choose

Jemma rapped her nails on the teacup, worrying her lower lip with her teeth. The tears had stopped, for now at least; her grief momentarily suspended in the wake of the increasingly wide-reaching ramifications that seemed to be coming from this. Communications were down. Someone, somewhere was storming the Academy. Their friends and classmates were Hydra, on the run, or dead. It was enough to turn the stomach – only, she hadn’t eaten anything in over a day. 

Fitz, lying on his bunk nearby, turned his Rubik’s cube over and over in his hands. His chest felt tight, his thoughts scattered. He stared blankly. Lost.

“D’you think Brian…” he wondered, trailing off before he could form the words. Voice straining, he recalled: “He was stationed at the Hub.” 

The Hub. The Triskellion, as it was officially known. One of the first places to fall – and in a big way, too. Which meant there was almost no way Brian’s story ended well. He probably wasn’t Hydra, Fitz thought – and hoped: they’d been fast friends back in the day. But even if he were loyal, Fitz couldn’t help but recall his own experience in the field, barely scraping out alive from his first firefight after almost having his throat slashed and almost blowing up a plane. The plane he’d been on. He’d been a bumbling giraffe of an agent and last time he’d checked, Brian wasn’t much better, physicality-wise. Being surrounded by enemies, and secret ones at that, he wouldn’t last long. 

And to think, earlier this morning, Fitz had teared up over wiping the personal data from everyone’s phones. 

Fortunately a knock on the door interrupted him before the tears could well again. Unfortunately though, it was Skye, with a tablet in her hands and a solemn, almost timid expression on her face. 

“Hey,” she greeted, similar discomfort mixed with sympathy in her tone. “How’re you guys holding up?” 

“Great,” Fitz responded, needling and sarcastic. “Nothing like watching everything you’ve ever achieved in your life get taken away. Fictional people taking all the credit – or worse, our names getting wiped while that lot gets to keep the glory. ‘n glory’s not even the worst of it.” 

“Fitz.” With as much strength as she could muster, Simmons scolded him. “Don’t take it out on Skye, this isn’t her fault.” 

“Take it out?” Fitz retorted. “I’m not taking anything out. This is calm. I’m… zen.” 

He clenched his jaw, and pressed the heels of his hands against the cube as hard as he could. The spiked shell of fury that had materialised to shield his grief and panic from prying eyes quickly crumbled and he sighed. Sitting up, he wiped a hand over his face to clear the clutter and haze.

“Sorry,” he whispered earnestly. “This is just… a lot.” 

“I understand.” Skye nodded, then shrugged, and then realised that a shrug was probably not appropriate. In truth, while she saw their pain it was difficult to connect. She didn’t have a history of marked achievement that anyone could take away though, she supposed. Nor did she have the kind of network of acquaintances, colleagues and friends that they did. 99% of all the people in the world who cared whether she lived or died were in this building, going through this same pain, this same fear, as Fitz and Simmons were. As guilty as the thought made her feel, she hadn’t felt so grateful to be alone in a long time. 

“We’re the lucky ones, though,” Jemma pointed out. Her tea was going cold. “Our loss is just paper, really, just scraps of code. Accolades. Plenty of people save the world and never get half as much.” 

“True,” Fitz acknowledged, though it didn’t make him feel any better. 

“I’m – sorry to do this,” Skye pressed, “but I’m actually here on business. I need to know, is there anything else you can think of where your personal details might be found. Old social media profiles, comments on New Yorker articles, a digitized catalogue of your baby photos…” 

Jemma shook her head, but Fitz hummed in consternation. Skye raised an eyebrow and he let out a second sigh.

“Actually,” he said, “there is.” 

Jemma glanced at him like she knew what he was talking about. Fitz glanced back at her, as if he had been expecting the look.

“It’s okay, Jemma. I was going to tell her sooner or later.” 

“Tell me what?” Skye frowned, watching as Jemma brought Fitz what appeared to be an old shoebox, from his shelf. Fitz waved Skye over as he dug through it. 

“I want to show you something,” he said. She sat on the bed beside him and took the photograph he held out. On a field of thick, patchy grass – somebody’s yard, most likely – stood a young child, probably around eight years old. A little girl, sandy blonde hair, her fists clenched in the skirt of her dress, which was somewhere between white and yellow – the photo was a little discoloured with age, so it was hard to tell. The girl scowled at the camera, and her eyes were on somebody standing next to the photographer, out of frame. 

“School picture day?” Skye quipped, looking back at Fitz. 

“It was, actually,” Fitz recalled, with a grimace. “But that’s not why I’m showing you. 

Skye scanned the picture again. Not much more came to mind by way of observation, except that the girl looked like Fitz – which was unsurprising, since he had her photograph in his box of momentos from home. 

“Who is she?” Skye speculated. “Your sister? D’you have a sister?”

“No.” Fitz took a deep breath. Time to move this along. “That’s me.” 

“Really?” Skye frowned down at the picture again, and bit her lip. Part of her wondered if this was not another one of their pranks, though to what end she wasn’t sure, and the timing seemed extremely insensitive, even for Jemma’s usual tactlessless. Plus, as best Skye could tell, the photo was genuine and there was no other reason she could think of for Fitz to expose this kind of secret only to lie about it. Surely it would be easier to fake having a sister. And even if Fitz could pull it off, Jemma wasn’t sitting beside him, holding his hand, with an eerily May-like expression of neutrality for nothing. 

“Okay,” Skye said. “I believe you.” 

Fitz frowned a little, surprised at the anti-climactic response. “Do you have questions?” 

“What kind of security threat do you think this poses?”

“What?”

“That’s why you showed me, right?” 

“Right. Yeah.” He blinked, pulling himself together. “I’m not sure. There’s probably not even that much of her online, but you said everything, so, um…”

Feeling his hands begin to fret again, Jemma passed a pillow over. Fitz hugged it close to his chest. Skye was busy scanning the picture into her device and adding it to the search parameters, so Fitz had time to check his voice before he spoke.

“Her – My, uh, name was Bridget. If that means anything.” 

“Sure, I’ll add it,” Skye murmured, typing into the search field. She paused, finger hovering above the screen. Fitz seemed hurt, and though her job was important – possibly moreso than anything she’d done with Shield so far – she was finding it hard to ignore the shimmering vulnerability that seemed to emanate off him. Maybe she didn’t understand the depth of what they, as Shield veterans, were going through right now, but Fitz clearly put a lot of weight on coming out to her and she was rejecting him. She knew that feeling far too well. 

Taking a deep breath, Skye set the tablet aside. 

“Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to be an ass, I just didn’t want to pry, which is ironic, since I’ve been sifting through everyone’s dirty laundry the last few days…” 

“S’okay,” Fitz replied. “Kinda surprised you didn’t know already, actually. Everyone else does.”

“Everyone?” Skye raised an eyebrow.

“It’s in my file, so May and Coulson definitely know, and I told Jemma already. Ward, I’m not sure. Sometimes he says things… but maybe he’s just teasing me, or I’m reading too much in. He does have higher clearance though so who knows.” Fitz shook his head. “That’s not the point. The point is, I didn’t really tell you because of security. I mean, that helped, but either way it just didn’t seem right that everyone else got to know and you didn’t.” 

“Then, thank you,” Skye said. “I wish it could have been a less morbid occasion but here we are. Can I sit?”

Fitz and Simmons scooched along the bed to give Skye some space. Then all three of them leant backward, and huffed out a breath of air as they took sanctuary lying under the roof of Fitz’s bunk.

“Can I ask, Skye,” Jemma wondered, “you didn’t seem that surprised, or confused. Have you encountered this sort of thing much before?”

“I mean, yeah.” Skye shrugged. “I was an underground anarchist hacktivist. You meet all sorts of people in that world, plenty of trans people. Might be a bit out of date but for the most part it’s… pretty normal to me, if that makes sense.” 

“Sure you don’t have any questions?” Fitz asked. Skye took a moment to consider, and then ventured forward.

“Okay, I’ve gotta ask. _Leopold?”_

“I _know,”_ Fitz groaned. “My mum thought of it. Thought it sounded brave and strong. ‘Lion-heart’. You know.” He snorted, and gestured down the length of his body with distaste. “Then she got this string bean.”

Jemma batted at him. “Shush, you. I think you’re very brave. You can’t be brave without being scared first.”

“Yeah… that’s not better.”

Fitz screwed up his nose and Jemma laughed. Skye laughed with her, and her hands joined the tangle of Fitz’s and Simmons’ in the middle of them all. As the humour of the moment fizzled - the weight of the day’s more sobering revelations making itself felt once more - she gave a squeeze.

“Thank you for trusting me,” she said. “I promise I won’t tell anyone. And for the record, I think you’re plenty brave. Not just for this, I mean - I knew you for like, one day, and you’d already been shot at, held at gunpoint, and nearly blown up twice and you still didn’t tell Shield to shove it, so don’t underestimate yourself. But also… there is something to this. Knowing who you are. To be honest, I’m kinda jealous, actually.”

A heavy moment passed between the three of them as they reflected further back than the fall of Shield. It was not only Fitz and Simmons who’d had their worlds shaken lately: Skye’s search for her mother had come to the most heartbreaking dead-end possible, and despite all her hopes, she was an orphan after all.

But after that moment, Fitz squeezed her hand.

“Hey,” he quipped. “Who says I know who I am? I have an existential crisis every other day. Got one scheduled for tomorrow at 10 if you want to join.” 

“Sounds good,” Skye said. “I’m in.”


End file.
